Category: gender

So I voted Leave. Once a passionate pro-European, my disillusionment was gradual and culminated in utter horror at the harrowing of Greece during the financial crisis. At the most basic level I felt that the EU was/is ultimately doomed to fail because it does not have popular support. I felt (& feel) staying in & struggling to help make it work was a huge instance of the sunk cost fallacy & fixing that was worth taking a hit in the short term.

During the ref campaign I was the only person I knew willing to argue on FB for Leave. Everyone else in my circle was Remain & I lost a fair few friends. I’m not whining; I want to draw a parallel with what’s happening right now in the campaign against self-ID, bear with me. Being against gender self-ID in ‘polite society’ feels very like being for Leave did during the referendum (& indeed still does). Nice People Like Us don’t hold those views. Granted, trans twitchhunts are more savage than Remainer ones but the groupthink & suppression are similar. Now, I know some gender critical ppl are also #FBPE types & will not relish this analogy. But Remain lost partly b/c Remainers underestimated the strength of popular anti-EU feeling. And I’m saying take heart on the self-ID cause because transactivism is making the same mistake.

Transactivism lives in a tiny woke bubble, reinforced by blocking dissenting views on social media & swarming to vilify, silence & eliminate alternate views. So it has a hugely inflated sense of how well supported it is – like Ed Miliband’s Labour govt, or the Remain campaign. And like the Leave campaign, the real resistance to transactivism will come from people who don’t spend a huge amount of time on Twitter, but whose voices will, in the end, be heard. The silent majority will stand with the radfems on this issue. I’m 100% certain of it. So if you’re gender critical, be cheerful: the common sense majority agrees with you. Self-ID is nonsense. And everything you do to reach out beyond activist circles will help your cause. This issue isn’t getting popular resistance because many ordinary ppl are still oblivious.

Just to be clear: I am not saying being gender critical is like being a Leaver, or any bollocks about right or wrong sides of history. I don’t believe in historical progress. But transactivism is in a sense the same kind of liberal high water mark as the EU. Wanting ordinary ppl to bin the ideas of male and female in the name of some sunlit upland of ‘progress’ is an even bigger ask than wanting them to bin national identities. Resistance is being traduced as reactionary in a similar way. But resistance will be similarly implacable.

As a final note, though, Remain lost the referendum – but, with the entire cultural establishment on its side, it is winning the war. While campaigners against transgenderism may take heart from the fact that we have popular opinion on our side (however niche the issue may appear to many averagely apolitical people) it’s clear from Remain’s remarkably effective and sustained post-referendum rearguard action against the implementation of Brexit that pushing popular opinion against the enlightened views of the cultural establishment can take some doing.

The mealy-mouthed phrase ‘Oh of course I believe in freedom of speech, but…’ is heard ever more often among those who wish to be seen as nice, progressive, normal and appropriately leftish. And as it creeps further into normal language, it is increasingly not just those on the fringes of the Overton window who fall victim to the ever narrower definition of what is and is not acceptable speech to make freely.

Having mobilised free speech arguments to challenge the status quo from the 1960s onwards, the New Left has by now (for all that it lost the economic one) comprehensively won the culture war. But, having won, the New Left has gone on to develop an ideological immune system to consolidate that victory, and to prevent any insurgent ideas from threatening its hegemony.

One might characterise this immune system as a determined collective capacity to ignore, mock, smear, misrepresent, delegitimise and where necessary deploy more forceful methods of silencing any voice on the fringes of public discourse that challenges its orthodoxies. Adherence to these orthodoxies is enforced – on pain of expulsion from ‘polite society’ – every bit as pervasively as was regular churchgoing once upon a time. Nowhere is this more clear than in the trans juggernaut.

Not content with its admirable achievements in promoting equal treatment for all humans regardless of race, sex or faith, the New Left continues on a relentless pursuit of personal ‘liberation’ for each individual from all restraints of social convention, faith or even pragmatic common sense. Lately, it transpires, we must all go even further, and be liberated even from settled biological fact: men can be female, and women male; all humans must be freed to transcend their own embodied state, to be whatever they feel they are. To gainsay any individual’s personal identity is, now, to commit an act of intensely personal and cruel violence against an individual’s very sense of self and freedom.

The majority of the left sees this straightforwardly in terms of the next civil rights struggle, now that the one for lesbian and gay equality has been won. It is not enough that we have the Gender Recognition Act, which attempts to balance the right to gender self-expression against the rights of women and children to single-sex spaces. Rather trans activism seeks to force into accepted orthodoxy the notion that biological sex is meaningless, and instead all individuals have a ‘gender identity’, which can be changed in law by a simple administrative procedure (I’ve written about this here).

Women who dare ask questions about how this will impact sex discrimination regulations, gendered violence data gathering, pay gap data gathering, women’s shelters, prisons or changing rooms must be treated as though this new shibboleth is already orthodoxy: they must be silenced, utterly. Doxxing, threats of violence, physical assaults, lobbying Parliament to have the phrase ‘trans-identified male’ reclassified as hate crime are some of the tactics in common use. Mumsnet – one of the few online spaces where critical discussion around transgender activism is not heavily moderated – has seen its advertisers targeted by trans activism keen to pressure Mumsnet into implementing a more forceful moderation policy.

Women are being silenced. Left-wing women. Nowhere is this more painfully clear than in the push to deplatform Linda Bellos, a veteran lesbian feminist and founder of Black History Month. The mechanisms employed are the same ones as are used to silence other wicked, excluded voices: smears, harassment, and – wherever possible – the levers of law, power, government. And, because the left long since abandoned its previous spirited defence of free speech in favour of protecting its cultural victories via a policy of selected censorship (‘curated speech’ instead of free speech) left-wing women now have no defence against these parasites hollowing out liberation politics for their own purposes. Those feminists protesting at the female-bodied collateral damage that is starting to pile up up in the cause of freeing men to ‘be women’ are instead facing, at the hands of their former comrades on the left, the same tactics that the left has long since used to consolidate its cultural hegemony.

I shan’t quote anyone directly, but I see the hurt, frustration and rage boiling up. ‘What the fuck do you mean, we’re on the wrong side of history???’. How fucking dare you other, marginalise, smear, delegitimise us, who have so long been dutiful soldiers in the noble cause?

And yet, there it is: without the free speech argument, this will continue. It will get worse. The purges will continue within the left. Maybe we’ll see new orthodoxies starting to creep in that don’t even sound very left-wing at all, but can be justified with reference to liberation, equality, discrimination.

I decided to take this out of my replies to some tweets and do a thread because this ‘Paedophile Manifesto’ is so chilling it needs its own analysis and exposure. I’m only half way through as it is just making me so angry.

I was passed a ‘Paedophile Manifesto’ entitled ‘The handbook’ published 2015 on https://t.co/dIh6IunAPd to have a look at. It spends pages and pages talking about how to normalise what they refer to as ‘Adult-Child Sexual Relationships’. pic.twitter.com/o4RwegIksc

Look, I get it. If you’re a gender-critical feminist, you’re possibly a radical feminist. You’re 99.9999999% likely to be pretty left-wing. The cultural revolution is your baby. But babies grow up, and without checks and balances this one’s growing up mean.

The no-platforming, harassment, mockery, ostracism starts out being just for people you don’t like, and don’t agree with. So you don’t speak up. Then they’re gunning for people you thought were basically okay, but maybe you were wrong and anyway you’re afraid to speak out in case you get blowback. Then, suddenly, they’re coming for people a whole lot like you, to stifle an issue you actually really care about.

This isn’t just about saving women from a misogynistic campaign to abolish legal recognition of sex differences in the name of a spurious freedom to ape the behavioural stereotypes imposed on the opposite sex. It’s about retaining, for the left, the ability to save the left from itself – an ability that looks worryingly to be already hanging by a thread. Gender critical feminists are the canaries in the left-wing coalmine. Without a spirited defence of free speech – yes, even for Tommy Robinson – the left will incrementally be taken over by and for interests a long way from the oppressed, the powerless, the voiceless whom the left claim to wish to represent, lift up and defend. Misogynists; paedophiles; those who seek to reintroduce blasphemy laws. It’s all coming.

Gender critical feminists: this is bigger even than a battle to keep the rights women have won. It’s a fight for the soul of liberation politics. Without a spirited left-wing defence of free speech – and let’s face it, this is a pretty radical suggestion nowadays – the left is a sitting duck. For while its immune system is effective at purging antagonists, it is defenceless against parasites. Transgenderism is just the first of many ideological parasites: it has already colonised most mainstream LGB lobby groups. More will follow, each dripping with the magic aura of liberation, open-mindedness, toleration, equality, justice, inclusion and an end to discrimination. Opposing these parasites will mean falling foul of the prohibition on any thought, speech or action that can be painted as discriminatory, intolerant, exclusionary or bigoted.

The only such defence that stands the test of time is the free speech defence, and that means defending it even for those whose views we dislike. It’s time to hold your noses and stand with Tommy Robinson.

Many have ignored the debate so far, seeing it as an arcane internecine spat on the left and good for a chuckle or two, nothing more. But changes to the law on trans issues affect everyone. If you care at all about personal liberty and (relative) freedom from government overreach, here are two reasons why you should oppose ‘self-ID’: firstly, it’s a monstrous power grab by a government already giddy and bloated with the powers it increasingly clutches to itself. And secondly, if this goes through we might as well have done with it and just reinstate blasphemy laws.

It’s a massive government power grab: Effectively the changes replace sex with ‘gender identity’. So what, you might say. But sex is observable: even without peering at genitals humans can identify with near-perfect accuracy whether another human is male or female. Even my 18-month-old can do it and she’s only just learned the words for ‘man’ and ‘lady’. But once someone can declare themselves legally ‘male’ or ‘female’ simply by filling in a form, based on no external factors whatsoever and simply their feeling about what they are, sex stops being an observable property of everyone’s physical selves and becomes ‘gender identity’, an abstract property of everyone’s inner life. At that moment the final arbiter of who is or isn’t male or female stops being the evidence of your and everyone else’s eyes.

In order for ‘gender identity’ to have any meaning, therefore, it needs to be ratified by – guess who? Enter your friendly bureaucratic state. The government will have abolished your sex and given you something called a ‘gender identity’ instead, to which of course only the government can give binding force.

Michael Merrick’s brilliant essay The Labour Family sets out how the same radically individualist concept of ‘liberty’ – articulated on the right in the economic sphere and on the left in the social – placed the state in direct competition with social structures, networks and traditions as the prime means of individuals’ support.

For liberty to flourish the state had to remain neutral toward the conduct of those residing within it. It could dispense justice where contracts were unjustly breached, but the manner in which they were drawn, the manner in which they ended, and the manner in which they affected third parties and society as a whole remained outside the purview of the state. Yet it also needed vigorous protection and a legislative commitment to mitigate the fallout from such self-centred accounts of freedom. This put the state in direct competition with that supportive web of relationships that traditionally regulated individual behaviour as well as helped absorb fallout when required. In providing an alternative to these networks, in rendering associative, reciprocal, mutualistic society no longer at the core of individual progress and preservation, the state had begun to monopolise the space where society used to be. The result was corrosive to any sort of relational politics; a system with a focus on outcomes, as Ruth Porter explains, ‘removes any connection between action and consequence. In doing so, it destroys the very reflex which encourages moral action. By consequence, this breeds a sense of entitlement. This undermines social bonds both in families and also communities more broadly.’

The paradox in the dynamic outlined above is that in order for liberty – understood in a strictly individualistic sense – to flourish, the state increasingly took the place of the customs and networks that had traditionally regulated behavour, thus growing – in the name of freedom – ever bigger.

In a traditionally understood concept of identity, each of us is recognised by those around us as those things we are, in the social sphere: a mother, a husband, a writer, a daughter, a good cook, a teller of jokes, etc. Without that social recognition, that echo returning from the Other that says ‘I see you, and yes, I agree with you that you are [that thing you feel you are]’, each person’s inner feeling about who or what she is can be nothing but empty yearning.

But in the radical individualist new world we are entering, each person’s inner feeling of personal identity is not only paramount but the only truth. Interpellation by the other is, we are told, rendered null and void. Only thus can each individual be freed from the oppressive social gaze to flourish as the unique marvel he or she (or ze or hir or whatever) is.

But there’s a catch. If it’s not the people around me who affirm my identity, it has to happen somewhere. So naturally, again, the state steps in. Much as the state stepped in to create government-sanctioned structures intended to replace those stifling social networks and conventions that had hitherto regulated behaviour, here again in the name of freedom the state gets even bigger.

The proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act are as colossal a power grab by the state as the proposal to make organ donation opt-out rather than opt-in. Not only does the state propose to own my physical organs by default, it also proposes to become the ultimate arbiter – over the heads of all those around me and even of observable truth – of whether I am male or female. Not content with inserting itself between individuals and their social spheres, the state must insert itself between us and our very sex, arrogating to itself the right to determine the truth of something which is in fact inscribed in every cell of our bodies.

Secondly, blasphemy. Think I’m joking? Consider this: once the government is established as the final – the only – arbiter of whether I am male or female, then disagreeing with the government’s view that this person or this person or this person are, in fact, women represents an assault on government power. I don’t get to argue with the government about what the rate of income tax is, and if the government says person X is a woman, then they are a woman. Combine that with hate speech rules (which have already shown an alarming degree of mission creep) and you have a situation where refusing to tell lies that have been sanctioned by the state as the truth could land me with a fine or in jail. If that isn’t a de facto blasphemy law I don’t know what is. Indeed in a recent court case where a young trans-identified male, ‘Tara’ Wolf was convicted of assaulting a 60-year-old woman, the judge reduced the fine and declined to award compensation because the victim did not always refer to her male attacker using female pronouns.

To be clear, I don’t really care how people dress or present themselves. I think the world would be a nicer place if we didn’t set quite so much store by whether someone was wearing a frock or makeup or whatever. I’ll even call a man ‘she’ out of politeness, if politeness is warranted. But a dress, hormone supplementation or cosmetic surgery don’t alter someone’s actual sex. The state has no place insisting otherwise. Nor does the state have any place announcing that in fact sex is irrelevant and that to help us be freer it will helpfully supply and manage for each of us a new tailored and oh-so-individual gender identity. But as that awful Breitbart man once said, politics is downstream from culture; the push in our culture continues to be away from the social (relationally understood) toward the radically individualised; I fear many of us will be blaspheming before this phenomenon works itself out.

The Master of Eton has announced that should any of his pupils decide to ‘change their gender’ they would be allowed to remain in the school. Now, I’ve met my share of Old Etonians and basis that experience the notion of any current Eton pupil opting to do this seems vanishingly remote. But, says the Master of Eton, if a pupil did he would not be asked to leave the school.

This has been reported by The Guardian as a nice progressive thing. But he also says that Eton has no plans to admit girls. Think about that for a minute. If Eton has no plans to admit girls, but would permit a transgender ‘girl’ to remain at the school, then clearly he considers them to be really boys. Or at least not girls.

I’m not going to do a long rant about male privilege here. But something odd is going on. Trans women seem keen to assert their womanhood in order to insert themselves into women’s changing rooms and other sex-segregated places, but considerably more reluctant to accept a post-transition exclusion from spaces where natal women would not be admitted. Bruce Jenner retains his golf club membership post-transition; the Savile Club in Mayfair has permitted a member to remain despite being in transition to ‘become a woman’. And it appears that the world-class education at Eton, not available to natal girls, is (hypothetically at least) nonetheless available to trans ones.

The ratchet of exclusion, it seems, only works one way. Trans females are 100% genuinely female when it comes to their participation in female spaces, but exceptions are somehow made when the prospect of relinquishing their access to exclusive all-male clubs and societies rears its head. Funny that.

Trans women can’t have it both ways. If Bruce, or the nameless Savile member, or any other male putative ‘woman’ really wants to be a woman, then they should take it for the team and stand down. Accept their exclusion like the natal women they claim they really truly have been all along. Otherwise these august establishments are confirming what women have been saying all along: trans women aren’t really women. If they were, we’d exclude them.

Where is the outrage at this rampant transphobia? Trans activists should be picketing Eton College, Sherwood Country Club and the Savile Club to demand that they treat their transgender members as real women and exclude them. And the fact that this isn’t happening does nothing to dispel the impression natal women are getting, that not even trans women really think they’re women. Not in situations where being a woman might actually have a downside.

The horrors and atrocities of history have been edited out of primary and secondary education except where they can be blamed on racism, sexism, and imperialism — toxins embedded in oppressive outside structures that must be smashed and remade. But the real problem resides in human nature, which religion as well as great art sees as eternally torn by a war between the forces of darkness and light.

“Being “trans” is too easy. It’s an identity picked off a shelf and inside the packaging, there’s a list of other necessary components one must procure before reaching authentic selfhood. “Being trans” to girls like my daughter is like a quest in a video game with each “affirming’ “medical procedure acquired is an “epic win” bringing you one step closer to having all your problems solved. Except no video game exists that suppresses development or leads to the removal of healthy body parts. Being trans isn’t a video game, it’s real life. Real, painful, confusing, life and being trans was the defining aspect not only of identity but also the root of all her suffering.

I supported my child in her journey. What I didn’t do was accept the first and easiest answer. I helped my daughter know that disagreement or unacceptance of any gendered norm was more than okay. I fully supported what my generation quaintly called ‘gender bending” in all ways, but I didn’t agree to let her subject herself to significant bodily harm in an attempt to treat her dysphoria. From the very first announcement, I let her know that she could cut her hair however she wanted, wear whatever clothing she wanted, and use whatever name she chose.

I supported her in her discomfort, to the best of my ability, and I also let her know that discomfort and confusion are legitimate aspects of a meaningful, deeply explored life.”

Back when I was a young thing, it was ‘LGB’ and that was an end to it. Where did the rest of the alphabet soup come from?

LGB made sense. For all that the different groups within it had different interests, cultures and priorities all three had one positive thing in common – a stance that could be summed up along the lines of ‘We hold that romantic and sexual same-sex relationships are and should be deemed normal and healthy for those who wish to pursue them’. Lesbian, gay and bisexual people all have that in common. Easy.

But now add in the rest of the alphabet soup, and what does the whole group have in common? What statement can be made that unites the interests of a lesbian with a late-transitioning, autogynephilic trans-identified male who is attracted to women, and an asexual person who experiences no sexual attraction to anyone? Yet they all (L, T, A) belong – or so we are told – in the same alphabet soup.

LGB is about same-sex relationships. The remainder don’t even necessarily define themselves in opposition to normative heterosexuality. Heterosexual people can apparently be queer, so you can be straight and in the gang. There’s

even an extra ‘A’ in there for ‘allies’ that , the term used in identity politics for ‘people who belong to bad oppressor groups and are low on the victim hierarchy but still buy into our crazy and want to hang out with us, the victim elect, while constantly apologising for their existence and generally being whiny twats in the hope we’ll give them cookies’. What rights are they campaigning for? Why do they need a letter?

Because it’s not a campaign, it’s a club. And apparently these days you can still be in it even if you’re straight. Just say you’re nonbinary, declare yourself asexual, queer, questioning or an ally and you too can join a trendy gang that gives you permission to perform your virtue and special special difference from the normies, to take a nibble on the victim pie, to whip up Twitterstorms on behalf of whichever victim group is flavour of the month and, in a general way, soak up some of that nice righteousness that comes with being in an oppressed group. Even if you’re not really all that oppressed. (Is Jaden Smith oppressed?)

All very warm and fuzzy, but the upshot of this is that any clear message about gay rights is muffled as fuck. Indeed, once you buy into the idea that the alphabet soup needs to be ‘inclusive’ of the needs of all these people, most of whom have sod all in common and some of whom are actually just straight people who want to feel a bit special, you can’t really, actually, campaign for anything much. And if you try, the reality starts to bite, which is that you’ve created an umbrella group whose members, far from having shared interests, in fact have such mutually contradictory interests in many ways that the only way to be inclusive is for some or all of the letters to STFU. Campaign for contraception? The asexual non-shaggers get hurt feelings. Campaign for same-sex relationship acceptance? Not only do the bisexuals start complaining about invisibility (seriously, get over yourselves), but trans-identified heterosexual men start asserting that they are in fact also lesbians, so real lesbians should put out more. And then the lesbians get annoyed. (Of course here, we can guess who’s going to win the argument. Spoiler: cis lesbians are ugly and boring and their rights are all cool now yeah. So not the lesbians).

But I digress. What’s happened here is not, in fact, an expansion of the campaign for gay rights – it’s the disintegration of that campaign. It’s like what would happen if you decided in the name of inclusivity to open up the Olympics to competitive sewing, darts, poetry reading, cookery, dance and spelling bees. Suddenly you don’t have an athletics competition any more, you just have a vaguely feelgood sort of village show. (Which, coincidentally, is what’s happened to Pride marches, which used to be protests but are now ‘parades’ and sponsored by every virtue-signalling corporate under the sun, expressing nothing but vague, feelgood sort of general leftism with a side order of mild smugness at being a bit more victimy and self-righteous than those lame cishets). The alphabet soupers have in fact stolen the movement from under gay people, and killed it with inclusivity.

Then, the competing interests of genuine minorities (such as – whisper it – lesbians) suitably stifled, we are finding to our amazement that the loudest voices in the new, happy, inclusive alphabet soup movement are the same group as they are everywhere else: heterosexual men. Or, as they are now known, trans lesbians. Now that it’s impossible to campaign for the full range of self-evidently competing interests supposedly included in the alphabet soup, we have to prioritise someone. Who should we choose? I know – heterosexual men! And as new letters get added, and the original gay people start to protest, just watch as the newer ones, like cuckoos, begin to push them out of the nest.